Survival In Auschwitz

“Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

3 responses

You’re welcome. The Holocaust affected my family (my grandmother was interred at Bergen-Belsen and later, Auschwitz) and I grew up with stories of the atrocities. It always amazed me as a youngster how a society could allow such things to happen. Then I got older and i understood…

Interesting reflection, especially on how adulthood as perhaps educated you about the darkness of mankind and our capacity to do evil to others.

My father’s side of my family was completely decimated by the Shoah — almost all were killed in Auschwitz — and I grew up with the enormous sense of how horrific the death camps, and the ideas and regime which allowed them, had been.

On my website, I try to bear witness to the continued triumph — in the arts, sciences, and in society — of the Jewish people. And although I am only half-Jewish (father’s side), have never worshipped in a synagogue, and could easily pass as a WASP, I proudly take up the mantle of someone who is Jewish. As a philo-semite, I decided when I was pretty young, denial of Judaism in my family would not begin with me.